Computer networks, such as the Internet, enable transmission and reception of a vast array of information. In recent years, for example, some commercial retail stores have attempted to make product information available to customers over the Internet. It is becoming increasingly popular for information providers to provide mechanisms by which customers can compare such product information across multiple manufacturers and retailers. For simplicity, manufacturers, retailers, and others that sell products to customers are interchangeably referred to herein as “merchants.” For example, Internet search/shopping sites allow customers to compare pricing information for products across multiple merchants.
When many merchants sell the same product, it is important to identify the unique product being sold by different merchants and group product information and product offers that are for the same product together. This facilitates the creation of user interfaces that organize results to reduce the cognitive load on the user. Users can view results for a certain product, sold by various merchants for specific prices, leading to more of a “price comparison” experience. If this is not provided, the user may be presented with a jumbled collection of results that mix different products for sale together, and the user must perform a lot of work just to understand which results present offers for the same product from different merchants.
Just as knowing which product offers from different merchants are for the same product, better user interfaces can be created when a system knows that different products for sale are variants of one another, for example products having different colors or different sizes. Without this knowledge, the user must digest a collection of results and reason about the results to determine that two results are different colors or sizes of the same product. Therefore, it is desirable to present results that are organized to present product variants in a user friendly way.